GAIA - AAA terrain generator, procedural texturing, planting and scene creation

I am talking about the shader. Not gaia 2. I'm wondering if this will integrate with the like of enviro to do puddles and ripple effects on rain, snow on hailstorm weather and such.

 

Not in the first release, however this is planned for later releases. If we kept on adding features to cover every use case we would never the the thing out!!

I was playing with Beautify the other day. Works fine as far as i can tell.

 

Not yet. The infrastructure is all there, and one of the beta testers has integrated it with his weather system (and it looks amazing).

 

As long as an animation curve or a slider is exposed I am good I suppose xD

 

Okay, well it dosent work with ufps, at least gaia 1 dosent.

 

Cool. I hope Tenkoku will work just as good as it does now with Gaia.

 

Hi. Could you help me, please, with next grass density problem: when i use standard terrain settings in GaiaDefaults and GaiaResources - everything is ok, but if i set terrain size to 16384 and height to 2000 (i change only these settings) - i receive low grass density. What do i do wrong and what do you advise in this case?

 

@AdamGoodrich Given that RTP and Distingo are more like Gaia collaborators than competitors, I'd like to ask, are the upcoming shaders that will be included in Gaia 2.0 meant to be Gaia integrated solutions for some of the features that these assets provide? It seems like Gaia is on the way to becoming a one-stop shop for terrain generation in Unity, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

 

How are they related - and what is the issue with UFPS ?

Its a whole new product and has no connection to Gaia other than I helped create it - so it will not be included with Gaia! I will continue to work with and expand support for other shaders as well. The intention of Gaia has always been to add value to Unity, and work with everything.

You will need to change more than just the terrain size and height I suspect. My suggestion is to first work out what settings work for your terrain, and then reflect them into your defaults and resources file.

There are many tutorials here you can look at here: http://www.procedural-worlds.com/gaia/tutorials/

 

Btw.. for those of you using Ultimate Survival with Gaia - there is an issue with the wood chopping script.

The issue is that it expects your terrain to be at 0,0,0.. whereas Gaia puts it in a different place. The work around for now is to do your stamping.. then move your terrain.. and then do your spawning. Make sure you select 'Fit to Terrain' on your spawners first.

I communicated with the author about this yesterday and there is a fix for this coming in the next version.

 

It´s a bit tricky because UFPS uses 2 cams, fps cam & weapon cam. So when I apply the effects nothing happends... and if I set it to afternoon (wich work) and then set it to day, its still afternoon... somehow just hangs.. I dont really get it.. something with deffered and forward rendering? .... but anyhow I just dont use them and just use the effects that I put there myself.. on the weapon cam. I guess its just like usual effects? i got the same results with beautify and post processing stack?

Love gaia!

Peace

 

Hi Adam.
I want to make a terrain generated with Gaia infinite,
as you know that this can only be done by code, so as i am not very good in scripting then will you please help me how to do this ?

 

Ahh.. Yeah - Gaia just adds effects to the 'Main' camera, and is not smart enough to know how to differentiate between multiple cameras.

Gaia does not support infinite terrain, and to do it via code is non trivial. You would need to be a pretty expert coder. Gaia 2 will make this feasible in real time, but even with this, it will still be a substantial amount of work to create.

If you wish to engage my services to create this for you then let me know via PM, however as it currently stands this is not the intention of Gaia, and not something I will do for free.

 

okay.
any other way to keep player on the environment and not reach or never see the edge of the terrain when player moving and walking on the terrain.

 

Yep - you need to artfully design your environment to contain the player in the space you have provided.

Use mountains and terrain as a natural barrier. Use rocks and ledges and perhaps fences and rivers as other natural barriers.

Think about the users journey and use visual cues to draw them into the experiences you are crafting for them.

Gaia is good at this because the stamping system gives you full control over your environment.

All game development is a balance between the resources of the people developing it, and the technology available to the people playing your game, so artful level design is a key skillset.

Here are some interesting sites / articles that might help :

https://80.lv/articles/skyrim-designer-on-building-virtual-worlds/
https://80.lv/?q=level+design

http://www.worldofleveldesign.com/categories/cat_game_environment_design.php

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DanT...en_Principles_of_Good_Level_Design_Part_1.php

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131655/applying_game_design_to_virtual_.php?page=1

 

With Gaia you can change the terrain size.. I have 6km×6km wich I think Its pretty big.. also you can surround the whole place with water like an island , thats the best,, but just Like Adam said using mountain as barriers n such, and also to mix in horizon is pretty cool... it is possible to make infinite terrain if you make it buy code so its duplicating the tile you are standing on and putting 2 forward but then they would look a like and thats quite lame.. why does everybody want the infinite terrain? Infinite water I have and thats just so the square planes never shows.. I havent even really planned to make it possible to go so far.. just look at skyrim. Thats just one world..optimized quite good to be handled..and its quite huge. I dont thinl I have walked everywhere.. and they use mountains as barriers.. have a nice day

 

One way to create an infinite terrain in code with Gaia, to the best of my knowledge, is to manually create several / hundreds of smaller terrain blocks with Gaia and programmatically select which one to place where and connect the edges up ( or make each terrain have the same edge height by design ). Crowfall did something like this and effectively made a plug and click in place terrain system but in their case it still wasn't an infinite terrain as each campaign map is of a finite size.

One thought I had was to create a series of flat terrains for plains, a flat terrain selection with trees for a set of forest blocks, a set of terrains that had hills in different locations and a series of terrains that had rivers in them, however they would have to be self enclosed or designed to connect with a another river tile or beach tile etc You could then create a set of boundary tiles to either have mountains or ocean that can be effectively used to stop the player from going further in that area.

However, with Gaia 2 this could be a lot easier by creating a large terrain using multiple terrain objects for a continent / large island. Smaller terrains for smaller islands and so on. Rinse and repeat to get a varied collection.

In either case it would be simply be the case of identifying, using noise/random, which tile type should be placed where and select one from the selection for that type. Empty space around the tiles could then be the dead ocean zone where you simply make them die if they go too far.

There may be better ways to do this but these are what has sprung to my mind for my own planet sized terrain considerations.

 

About low grass density: "Detail resolution" (max 4048) and "Detail density" (in Terrain settings) have most fixed my problem.

Ok, thank you, i have already started to watch you videos

 

Pardon me if I missed the answer somewhere along the forum. But will there be any baked occlusion for the terrain in Gaia 2? If not, is there a preferred system that others are using?

 

Not sure what you are asking.

 

Isn't this something related to the lighting setup ?

 

I think ArtisicSliz is talking about Occlusion Culling

 

Yeah, thanks for adding clarity. I meant to type "baked occlusion culling" but the culling got... well, culled.

 

No problem. I haven't tested multi terrain with baked occlusion culling, but don't see a problem. Maybe create a test scene with multiple simple terrains and a mountain to check if everything is culled correctly. If it's working it also should work with your terrain tiles you created with Gaia.

 

how close are we getting to 2.0

 

It's been delayed a little getting CTS out. CTS should be launched within a week, and then am full steam ahead back into G2 dev.

I know it probably sounds a little lame, but I wont publish G2 until it is what I would call good. My products are generally known to be high quality, and that's something I am unwilling to destroy by pushing something that is not yet ready out.

The feedback from the beta so far even on an unfinished product is already fantastic, but if I put something that is not good out there I have been around the asset store long enough to know that I will get massively flamed.

So - its going to be a little while yet. The good news I suppose is that yesterday was my last day teaching. I have resigned so I can devote more time to this. So as of today I am fully dependent on the asset store to live and this buys me an extra 2 days a week to focus on G2.



And because I can, here is a little image from CTS showing height blending on the rocky wall.



And this one - a G2 terrain treated with CTS. The sky and fog is Azure Sky. The trees are Alaskan Cedars from SpeedTree's Desktop Trees Package. The Alaskan Cedars are one of my favourite trees.

 

Really nice =) CTS...is that the shader for gaia 2 ? Sorry for dumb question

 

Well, really, what I'm asking is whether or not Gaia 2 will have an occlusion culling baking system. And if not, is there a favored method here to get long-distance terrain view with proper occlusion for unseen faces? I know that Unity has an occlusion volume system, but it's... "basic" is a nice term for it.

 

Hi guys, I need help with Gaia. Recently when ever I make a new generation and apply player/wind/water, I will not get the water to show up. The water level itself shows up in the stamper, but no water will actually appear. The Water object, and the 4 tiles will appear, but nothing shows. All of the shaders appear to be normal. I have also tried reimporting gaia, and also figured it could have been because I wasnt using the latest version of unity, but neither of those fixed this issue. Any thoughts?

I should also note that this is also for the editor, not just ingame

 

No - its just does standard unity terrain.

Gaia instantiates Unity water - it does not have its own water system. Have you had any luck placing the water manually ?

 

Heys guys can somone be nice enough to point out which video or which post shows you how to add an erosion mask to Gaia.

Lol....I even checked my previous posts as Adam and I discussed it 12 months ago ....but I'm getting older and wearing glasses and for the life of me cannot find it

 

In the current Gaia generation you cannot (not easily anyhow). I would never...ever...use a noise filter or masking to do erosion/sedimentation. It is just too specific to allow general textures/masking to do the task at hand. It takes a very good math algorithm to simulate this and apply it to terrain features.

I use a mixture of tools to get the job done. I do the terrain with Gaia in Unity then export the heightmap. I then import that heightmap into L3DT and have it do Erosion there (L3DT's Erosion is extremely good). You can add features as well. To add...you can also make multi-tile seamless terrains here as well...AND....you can make your splats with good sedimentation flow mapping as well. I export the new heightmap(s) from L3DT and import to Unity and apply a dark grey texture. I then use Erosion Brush to spot paint in additional erosion/sedimentation.
Caveat: You could do all the erosion process with Erosion Brush right within Unity. The only issue is you have to be careful when painting to get a Uniform/Natural pressure across the entire landscape....which is far better in L3DT.

After all of that....I go ahead and splat the landscape and use the sedimentation texture with a light opacity brush to 'smudge' in where needed.

 

Not erosion exactly, but were you perhaps talking about the Water Flowmap Exporter? Adam answered a question from you in post #3898 where he referred to it. There's more info in post #7270, if that's what you meant. It basically lets you export a water flow map, that can then be used as a mask for a given texture layer, to accentuate grass textures for instance in areas with higher water flows. Don't know if it could be used as a stamp mask as well.

As for actual terrain erosion, have you looked at Terrain Water Erosion, by Dmitry Soldatenkov? It's not a brush, but uses an iterative water erosion algorithm on the entire terrain. It's not free, but at $5, it won't break the bank.

 

A bit of eye candy to start the day

Experimenting with smoothness on a G2 landscape, with CTS shader. The snow can be controlled with a couple of sliders!

 

Thanks Olander and FargleBargle.

Thanks for finding those posts. I have Erosion brush which is great for limited areas, but the waterflow mask is what i was looking for. I'll also take a look at the Terrain Water Erosion for $5. Between these two things that will see me through until Adam releases Gaia 2.

 

Final CTS movie, now second with snow and done

 

@NatureManufacture Awesome Also I bought your World Streamer over a year ago and never used it until now, omg its like magic! This is a must have if you want to create large open worlds, and its so easy to setup, thank you

 

I did as well. It seems like it might have been a good purchase after all, especially with Adam and NatureManufacture working closely to design the forthcoming, forever mentioned, seldomly shown, constantly alluded to, but as ellusive as Bigfoot, much hyped shader.

 

ROFL

I am loving this new shader - can't imagine unity without it now!!

 

Ok - so finally - its announced in the forums - please check out CTS

https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/cts-complete-terrain-shader.477615/

 

Hello @AdamGoodrich ! =)

I wanted to make a bigger terrain so I changed the Terrain size in gaiadefaults ( I duplicated it, and used the power of 16..) So , I changed the Terrain Size to : 4096 and Height to : 2000

But I got this message;

Terrain size must be power of 2! 409 was changed to 512.

UnityEngine.Debug:LogError(Object)
Gaia.GaiaDefaultsEditor:OnInspectorGUI() (at Assets/Gaia/Scripts/Editor/GaiaDefaultsEditor.cs:52)
UnityEditor.DockArea:OnGUI()


what does it mean?

Thanks!

 

Make your terrain size a power of 2 e.g. 512, 1024, 2048, 4096

It is more efficient in a bunch of different ways.

 

Sounds like you typed "409" instead of "4096".

 

Yes I did 4096 and Terrain Height 2000. Still got that message

 

Lol nope I didnt 4096

 

Hehe - its a warning only - it goes away when you dial the whole number in - but you can still see it in the log.

 

Well Im really nervous about warnings and errors, and this I got is RED (error?) Still works but in my last project I had alot of these and later the whole project crashed...I tried again typed 4096 and hit enter. Still there. Must I change something else besides Terrain Height? I totally red the documentation but I have to ask the developer because need to be sure Thank you!

 

I have had similar messages to this appear when in the middle of working on things. What I end up doing is periodically clearing the log out and making an adjustment again to see if it repeatedly occurs. Do you get similar messages but with 4, 40 before the 409 one appears ?

Perhaps a screen shot of the editor and error message .

 

Well, just did the same change you did and as you can see it checks every key press and the OnValidate function is checking if the current number is a power of 2 but isn't actually changing it as by the time you have finished typing it is a power of 2.

 

Oh okay I see well after I got those they disappeared when I cleared the log so I think its okay Thanks man !